Thank you, Madam Chair.
I understand the hesitation about the amount of work that would be need to done with my two recommendations. One of the reasons I suggested we do what the finance committee did...the finance committee is doing a lot more than I'm suggesting. We may choose to agree about one, but they agreed to have each party choose a consultant, which would be paid for, to appear in front of the finance committee two or three times every time there's a budget, and do all the work. They will advise the committee on how the budgeting process is actually happening at Finance and give them their forecasts, what they think ought to be happening, and so on.
The issue we're dealing with is very complex. We can continue with more hearings, as Madam Demers and others said, but we need to focus, and to some degree I think Mr. Stanton will say the same thing. But we don't have the expertise ourselves to focus in and start doing our analysis. This is where the consultant would come in to work with us and advise us on how it's coming along and the areas to focus on.
One of their recommendations, in addition to the text expenditures, might be to look at one department within a department as a model to start off with. But I think it would be helpful and useful to have someone work with our committee.
The other recommendation I made earlier was to have the Department of Finance at the outset. They say they're doing gender-based analysis. Some of the witnesses have said that this government and previous governments have not actually done it properly. They've done it, but without any real consequences or results. So there's no point in finger-pointing at anybody. There's a problem.
At the same time, why don't we ask the Department of Finance to actually do gender budgeting analysis? They can bring in experts to help them develop a structure, as the representative from South Africa said, with proper results management. We already have a results management structure in our system. They can come forward with an analysis on the tax expenditures and some parts of the tax structure, which would help us have some base from which to work.
I think the two parts--that, and the person working with us as we look at other things--would help us to really move ahead more quickly, instead of having constant hearings. We're a bit in the dark, in a way, because we can hear a lot more people, but where do we go from there?